Natufian culture, circa 14,000 B.C.: pet foxes and.....WHEAT????

Interesting article about how our ancestors semi-domesticated foxes. However, I noticed this little blurb about the 16,000-year-old Natufian culture described in the article:

"The burial ground is about 16,500 years old, meaning it dates back to just before the emergence of the Natufian culture, in which pioneers used wild cereals (such as wheat, barley and oats) in a practice that would eventually evolve into true farming."

Has anyone found any papers that truly substantiate this claim? Or is it similar to the previously-hyped "ancient grains discovery" that turned out to be non-grains like buckwheat?

Yep, I've seen some fascinating video of these foxes. It was onlyh about 7 generations of choosing the tamest foxes for breeding and they got foxes that act just like dogs. PLus the tamer genes also seem to correlate with genes for agouti and off coloring. They did not breed for color, only temperment, but the tamer foxes often had unusual colors as well. This was a problem as the goal was to breed fur coat foxes that were easier to handle. But the tamer foxes often did not have ideal coat color. They are only good as pets. Really cute pets!

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Answers

This fits in with most of what I've read, namely that after 2.5 million years of evolution, farming and agriculture arrived on the scene about 10,000 years ago. That there might have been some "pre-farming" use of grains a relatively short time before that is not too surprising.

It's important that we don't think of something like "wheat" as a monolithic, unchanging species. It wasn't the case surely, but even if emmer or einkorn were their primary staples, they wouldn't be anywhere near as bad as our high-gluten, low protein frankengrains.

This is nothing particularly exciting; there's evidence of use of wild sorghum going back 84,000 years, IIRC. We'd been probably eating the wild ancestors of modern grains occasionally, not as major staples, for quite a while before we took up farming.

There was a study in Russia 50 or 60 years ago where they bred the nice traits into a breed of fox, and bred out the wild. The domesticated foxes are still around. The videos I have seen, they might well be little dogs. Tame and happy, and their ears are no longer pointed!
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Yep, I've seen some fascinating video of these foxes. It was onlyh about 7 generations of choosing the tamest foxes for breeding and they got foxes that act just like dogs. PLus the tamer genes also seem to correlate with genes for agouti and off coloring. They did not breed for color, only temperment, but the tamer foxes often had unusual colors as well. This was a problem as the goal was to breed fur coat foxes that were easier to handle. But the tamer foxes often did not have ideal coat color. They are only good as pets. Really cute pets!

The Natufian culture existed in the Levant, around what is now Israel, Jordan and Syria. There is evidence for the use of wild cereal grains in that part of the world dating further back to 23,000 years ago. The following two papers are about an archaeological site in Israel called Ohalo II that was inhabited around 23,000 thousand years ago at the peak of the last ice age. It was then submerged under the waters of Lake Galilee perserving many plant remains that do not usually survive.

"Now, however, a collection of >90,000
plant remains, recently recovered from
the Stone Age site Ohalo II (23,000
B.P.), Israel, offers insights into
the plant foods of the late Upper
Paleolithic. The staple foods of this
assemblage were wild grasses, pushing
back the dietary shift to grains some
10,000 years earlier than previously
recognized. Besides the cereals (wild
wheat and barley), small-grained
grasses made up a large component of
the assemblage, indicating that the
BSR in the Levant was even broader
than originally conceived,
encompassing what would have been
low-ranked plant foods. Over the next
15,000 years small-grained grasses
were gradually replaced by the cereals
and ultimately disappeared from the
Levantine diet."

"Here we report the earliest direct
evidence for human processing of grass
seeds, including barley and possibly
wheat, in the form of starch grains
recovered from a ground stone artefact
from the Upper Palaeolithic site of
Ohalo II in Israel. Associated
evidence for an oven-like hearth was
also found at this site, suggesting
that dough made from grain flour was
baked. Our data indicate that routine
processing of a selected group of wild
cereals, combined with effective
methods of cooking ground seeds, were
practiced at least 12,000 years before
their domestication in southwest
Asia."

This is around the area of the fertile cresent, one of the areas that agriculture began so it is not really surprising that people had previously been used to using wild seeds for a long time.

SOme people tolerate wheat better than others. I would not be surprised if some cultures a fairly long time ago found that if processed, grain that they probably grew for their animals could also be eaten by humans. I can imagine it now. YOu are hungry. Maybe a mountain lion just ate your cow or goat or whatever. But you have all this grain growing right there. YOu know the cow ate it but you can't eat it straight, but maybe if you ground it up, and you cooked it. Might not be so bad...if you were hungry. After a while, it might become a fallback food for when you couldn't find anything else. And you would gradually learn to prepare it to taste better. PLus this would be a much older simpler more natural form of wheat than is now used commercially. And since grain preparation was difficult and time consuming before machines were invented, it would not be a food of first choice. It would be a food you would fall back on when game was scarce and you couldn't find any fruits of veggies or tubers. So over time, there would be some genetic adaptation to consumption of the old forms of wheat.

But the poison is in the dose and the dose has shot up far faster than genetic adaptation could ever follow. Plus in the last 30 years, it's not just grain but grain oils, plus hydrogenated oils, plus ridiculous tons of sugar, and chemicals and hormones and pesticides. Plus many crops now are genetically modified with genes, some of which even come from animals. SO that plants will produce more lectins, which are poisonous to instects but also to humans. Somewhat ironic that for thousands of years, we probably tried to crossbreed and create crops that were tastier and had less poisons but now we are reversing that to create crops with more poisons, with taste falling onto the backburner compared to resistance to bruising, appearance, ability to ship, etc.

I am willing to bet if we all just ate a little bit of the same wheat our ancestors ate, and we all had to mill the stuff ourselves if we wanted to eat it, well I don't think so much wheat would get eaten in the first place and I don't think we would have all the problems we have. It's not just the wheat, but the kind of wheat, and the amount of wheat, and all the other junk that also is being eaten with the wheat. It all combines together.

But perhaps an ancient low gluten non mutant dwarf variety, properly soaked sprouted and fermented, didn't poison them to the same level. Nor does it show percentage PF diet or how they reacted long term such as diseases of civ.

As for foxes, we have further bred and domesticated canines to be companions.
Thorvin is the most awesome puppy I've ever met.